On a Friday morning in late June, Diana Lovett stopped by her office in Mamaroneck for a press interview at the start of another long workday. The 400-square-foot office on Halstead Avenue, where Lovett employs three other women and a helpful rotation of interns from Pace University, is a two-mile pedestrian commute from her home in Larchmont, which served as her office until a year ago.
“That was a little chaotic, because I have a baby ”“ and a cat,” said Lovett, the mother of a 2-year-old boy.
An entrepreneur in focused motion, she had done a product demo the previous day at the Whole Foods Market in Port Chester. Today the Massachusetts native and Yale graduate had a train to catch to Manhattan, where the business she founded two years ago, Cissé Trading Co., was an exhibitor under the Taste NY banner at the Summer Fancy Food Show in the Javits Center. Conveniently, the Cissé (pronounced see-say) office is directly across the street from the Metro-North station.
Her company”™s fancy food on display? Natural baking and hot chocolate powdered mixes that use cocoa harvested by farmers in a cooperative in the Dominican Republic certified by Fair Trade USA.
“Demos are really effective,” Lovett said of all the store appearances she and her co-workers have made. “We can see the lift (in sales) on demo days.”
It was Whole Foods that gave her company its first lift onto retail shelves in fall of 2012. Ciss̩ launched its line of natural cocoa-based products in 65 Whole Foods stores in the grocery chainӪs Boston and Mid-Atlantic regions.
Lovett had started testing recipes for her chocolate brownie, layer cake and chocolate chip cookie and muffin mixes in February 2012, only a month before she met with a Whole Foods buyer in Boston. “We literally had samples that we made in the kitchen and poster boards” for the meeting, she recalled. When Whole Foods agreed to stock her products, “We basically had from April to September to figure out how on earth to make a packaged food product. I was six months pregnant.”
To help fund its first production run, Ciss̩ that August raised $30,000 in a campaign on Kickstarter, the online crowdfunding site. In two rounds of financing, it raised more than $600,000 from investors, exceeding LovettӪs $500,000 goal.
Since its Whole Foods launch, the company”™s shelf presence has grown nearly tenfold, with 600 stores carrying its products. They include giants of the American supermarket industry, including Giant Food Stores, and gourmet groceries in the metropolitan area where Lovett and colleagues have gone “door-knocking” with their sales pitch ”“ among them, Balducci”™s, Fairway Market, DeCicco Family Markets, Mrs. Green”™s Natural Market and Union Market. Cissé also sells online through Amazon and Abe”™s Market. In September, the startup will launch with the online grocer FreshDirect, Lovett said.
Cissé added a major customer this year when The Kroger Co., the national supermarket chain headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, agreed to stock its powdered mixes in the natural foods section of its stores with a launch in its Atlanta region.
“It”™s 2,500 stores, which is big,” said Lovett. “Kroger is America”™s largest grocery chain. So we”™re thrilled. From Kickstarter to Kroger in a year and a half is like crazy.”
Cissé is vying for shelf space in a $3.2 billion market for baking and hot cocoa mixes, Lovett noted. “Eighty percent of it is the big guys,” with same-tasting products indistinguishable to consumers, she said. In that market, “I really think there”™s a great opportunity for something that”™s natural and has a social mission.”
For Lovett, the growing business merges her longtime humanitarian and charitable work in pursuit of social change with an entrepreneurial impulse that she first displayed as a lemonade stand operator as a kid growing up in Cambridge, Mass.
As a 19-year-old Yale undergraduate, she spent a year in South Africa doing volunteer work on a Fulbright scholarship, where she saw the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on Africans who could not afford to buy drug treatments. After postgraduate studies in international development economics at England”™s Cambridge University, she returned to Africa to work for the Ethiopian Children”™s Fund. (Lovett the entrepreneur brought back scarves from Ethiopia for resale in Boston.) At Keep A Child Alive, a New York City-based nonprofit that aids in medical treatment and support for African children and families infected by HIV, she continued her work in African countries. Connecting to her experience on the continent, she chose as her company”™s name a traditional African name that she finds “sweet and lyrical.”
Looking to start a socially engaged enterprise, Lovett drew upon another passion. “I”™ve always loved chocolate and hot cocoa,” she said. “So I kind of started putting pen to paper and traveled the world looking for cocoa” of the highest quality supplied by a farmers”™ cooperative.
Her quest began in West Africa, the source of 80 percent of the world”™s cocoa, Lovett said. But production there is geared for large-scale buyers. “Because we”™re so small, the logistics were really hard at the time.”
She traveled to Central America. In the Dominican Republic, she found cocoa of high quality being produced by farmers in FUNDOPO, the Organic Growers Dominican Foundation. Lovett said the co-op includes about 700 farmers whose farms average about 2 acres in size. Fifteen percent of the farmers are women, she said.
“I loved the taste and I loved the people,” she said. A partnership was formed.
As a member of the global fair trade initiative, FUNDOPO is paid premiums of 15 to 20 percent over market rate for its farmers”™ cocoa, Lovett said. About 80 percent of the premium revenue goes into community projects and the remainder is distributed to farmers, she said.
That cocoa arrives in the U.S. by a circuitous route. Fermented and dried at a processing center in the Dominican Republic, the collected cocoa beans are shipped from Santo Domingo to a processing plant in Brussels, Belgium, where European chocolatiers are better equipped for small-batch processing. From Belgium, the processed product is shipped to the U.S. as cocoa powder. Ciss̩Ӫs products are packaged at a pancake mix manufacturerӪs plant in the Central New York city of Auburn. From there they are sent to distributorsӪ warehouses across the country.
“It goes from Auburn, New York, to Auburn, Washington,” Lovett said.
As the business scales up, “We”™re getting to the point where we”™re going to be able to process in the U.S.,” she said.
From food science to financing to logistics, “I”™ve had to learn a lot,” said Cissé”™s founder. “Running a business, I”™ve grown in so many ways.”
